


LIIV

by Silverheart



Series: Histories of the Dov [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-08
Updated: 2015-03-08
Packaged: 2018-03-16 23:19:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3506468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverheart/pseuds/Silverheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Paarthurnax visits the imprisoned Numinex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	LIIV

In the days to come, this will be a palace. It’s no vision of the future, no promise of prophecy, that informs Paarthurnax’s prediction, merely (or more importantly) the tendencies of history.

  
Dragonsreach, the Joor call it, in their powerless tongue. Such places become the seats of their fleeting kings.

  
For now, however, it is a fortress-prison, with only one inmate.

  
Paarthurnax has sent the guard to sleep with a quiet Shout and now hovers on level with the prison’s highest level. It is not the first time he has visited, but he senses it is among the last.

  
Numinex, looking up from amidst his weighty chains with cloudy eyes, is fading. He grunts and shifts forward. “Paarth…ur…” The fragments of Words are a struggle.

  
The elder Dovah clings cautiously to the walls in a largely wasted effort at civility. If his brother recognizes old protocols, it does not show. “Numinex,” Paarthurnax names him, and again, “ _Numinex_.”

  
The name stirs the Dovah, bringing a slight spark of life into limbs encumbered by chains that should not be able to hold him. Should not…whatever that one-eyed Joor king did, it had brought Numinex low beyond imagining.

  
“Brother,” the prisoner manages, in the Joor language. Can he even speak Words now? Once the Joor spoke to him, taunts, but they get bored with every diversion sooner or later.

  
He would have once derided them for that, but he had seen and learned enough to understand the desire for variety. It’s part of why he flies from his mountain heights to visit Numinex. “Olaf One-eye has been chasing a bard across the mountains for a song he wrote of your last battle,” Paarthurnax says, with forced humor. Numinex would have found it amusing, once. “Even on the Throat of the World I hear of his rages about the tale.”

  
Something in Numinex comes alight, his old cruel humor, perhaps. Paarthurnax pities his brother Dovah, though he knows he was just as much a vicious destroyer as the rest of them. These visits of compassion are a gift from his meditations on the Thu’um- no reflection upon Numinex. They had never been close. No Dov are ever close. It is not in their nature.

  
“I think in time the Joor will remember Olaf as a villain,” Paarthurnax finishes when no words come from the other.

  
It would not be so hard, now, with King Olaf away, to release Numinex. But there would be no point. Legend may be unkind to his captor, but Numinex would become merely a beast in fact as in legend. Imprisonment had withered his mind, and Paarthurnax does not think the disease was curable. It is rooted too deep in his eyes, in the feel of him. That no Word had come from the Dovah stuck hard at Paarthurnax.

  
“Numinex,” he says again. The Dovah blinks blearily at him, then coils into his shackles, all liveliness gone. “My brother, Numinex.” Nothing this time.

  
Numinex does not remember his name. He does not remember himself.

  
Paarthurnax lifts himself off the walls, hovering before the darkened chained figure of one of the last living Dov. The power of his Shout on the guards is fading with the slowly rising sun.

  
The age of the Dov is past and past again, a thousand times gone from this world. No more would they alight upon the temples of their Priests to give judgment and counsel, or wait in a splendor beyond kings as trains of tribute made their way towards mountain altars where a Dovah perched as if upon a throne.

  
The Words they taught the Joor to glorify their heroes and their gods would crumble and wear, lost among the depths and summits, cursed by Alduin’s ambition. All that they had made glorious would surely wither as Numinex has.

  
Paarthurnax winged his way swiftly back to the highest of heights, there to hunt for a peace beyond Time’s storm, and await whatever form his own much deserved withering must take.

**Author's Note:**

> LIIV is the word for wither- or withered, the Dragon Language not having tenses.


End file.
